“It was home”: The Los Angeles bathroom that Jim Morrison turned into a studio
The three pillars of rock, “sex, drugs and rock and roll”, have long sounded exciting, but underneath the glossy surface exists a rather unglamorous reality. It’s best depicted in The Doors’ seminal rock and roll track that highlights the rather underwhelming reality that all three of those components lead back to one rather underwhelming location: the bathroom.
The first two need little explaining in that regard. It’s not uncommon for people to swap the bed linen for the cold rim of the toilet seat, in a desperate attempt to flee the public space and get their kicks, while the basin above the seat is commonly abused as a drug-cutting surface. In the domestic world, the bathroom is one of the few places with an internal lock, and so these two vices are given carte blanche to run wild inside it.
But rock and roll? Well, that’s ordinarily thrived in the public space, garnering attention from a bay of music-hungry audience members. But on ‘LA Woman’, Jim Morrison subverted that and completed the bathroom’s triple-pronged attack on rock culture’s most beloved phrase.
At this point, having garnered a wicked live reputation, The Doors were being offered a number of high-tech recording studios in which they could lay down the parts of their soon-to-be iconic album. But the luxury of those studios felt inherently contradictory to the wild spirit of the bands’ fraternity, particularly Morrison, and so abandoning that glamorous promise, The Doors retreated back to their rehearsal space.
“It was the room we had rehearsed in forever,” recalled John Densmore in the documentary Mr Mojo Risin. “Our music was seeped into the walls. We were very comfortable. It was home.” Home was a messy environment for the band, with spilt drinks and half-empty bags of drugs strewn across the rehearsal room floor.
But then, in a bid to secure some sort of acoustic privacy so that Morrison could record vocals, the band were swiftly reminded of the one place that could immediately provide that. And so, Morrison snatched his microphone and bundled into the adjoining bathroom, which swiftly became a vocal booth for the band.
Morrison ripped the door handle from its hinges in a bid to create some sort of musical connection with his bandmates, who would play next door, but largely, this cramped tiled wall gave him something of an acoustic refuge that allowed him to let rip on the vocal parts.
While the rehearsal space on 8512 Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood, California was originally called ‘The Workshop’, it swiftly changed hands and became a string of bars and restaurants. In the present day, it’s the site of the Tail O’ the Pup restaurant, which has kept the bathroom as something of a musical shrine to Morrison, keeping similarly plain tiled walls that are topped with a shrine to the enigmatic frontman.
It is, but another musical anecdote that proves musical greatness isn’t steeped in luxurious access, but instead a willingness to adapt and express your ideas, no matter the cost.
